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| Anton Raphael Mengs Helios as Personification of Mid-Day (supraporta for boudoir of María Luisa de Parma) ca. 1765 oil on canvas Palacio de La Moncloa, Madrid |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Hesperus as Personification of Evening (supraporta for boudoir of María Luisa de Parma) ca. 1765 oil on canvas Palacio de La Moncloa, Madrid |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Diana as Personification of Night (supraporta for boudoir of María Luisa de Parma) ca. 1765 oil on canvas Palacio de La Moncloa, Madrid |
"Anton Raphael Mengs was born in 1728 in Aussig in Bohemia, the son of the Danish-born painter Ismael Mengs, who was active as a court painter at Dresden. Already at the age of thirteen, after training under the severe discipline of his father, he came to know Rome, his father having obtained in 1741 a three-year leave of absence from his patron Augustus III for purposes of study, which was spent in Italy. During this period Anton Raphael spent some time in the studio of Marco Benefial, drawing from live models. . . . Mengs assimilated the Roman tradition as a grateful recipient; his own achievement lay in a critical re-evaluation of its elements, not in a creative reshaping or transformation analogous to the far greater artist Annibale Carracci. Without doubt the cold, reflective traits of Mengs's character outweighed any spontaneous ability at creative representation. . . . That it required a northern painter to remind the Romans of their own moribund tradition – though it did not lie within his own power to infuse it with a new warm and flourishing vitality – is an obvious sign of the times; it illustrates in a tragic manner the continuing decline of the creative abilities in Rome."
– Hermann Voss, from Baroque Painting in Rome (1925), revised and translated by Thomas Pelzel (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1997)
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Copy of Raphael's School of Athens fresco 1752-55 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Modello for Parnassus fresco (after Raphael) in the Villa Albani, Rome ca. 1760 oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"It is well known that the more radical turn towards a Neo-classical mode of painting was taken by the romanized Bohemian Anton Raphael Mengs. A mediocre talent, but enthusiastically supported by Winckelmann, the intellectual father of Neo-classicism, he was hailed by the whole of Europe as the re-discoverer of a lost truth. The work and ideas of the moralist and rationalist, who saw salvation in a denial of Baroque and Rococo painterly tradition and pleaded for an unconditional return to principles of design, cannot here be discussed. Suffice it to say that the Baroque allegorical method as well as the preciosity of Rococo art linger on in Mengs's art, while elements of his style (such as the choice of clear and bright local colours) may be traced back to his older contemporaries. Mengs himself had started under Marco Benefial, yet was not impervious to the qualities of Francesco Solimena's Baroque. In the last analysis he is as much an end as a beginning."
– Rudolf Wittkower, from Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750, originally published in 1958, revised by Joseph Connors and Jennifer Montagu and reissued in 1999 by Yale University Press
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Perseus and Andromeda 1778 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs The Dream of St Joseph 1773-74 oil on panel Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs St Eusebius carried to Heaven ca. 1757 oil on canvas Manchester Art Gallery |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Adoration of the Shepherds ca. 1769 oil on panel Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs St John the Baptist preaching in the Wilderness ca. 1760-70 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Flagellation 1769 oil on canvas Palacio Real de Madrid |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Descent from the Cross before 1779 oil on canvas St John's College, University of Cambridge |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Truth 1756 pastel Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Jupiter and Ganymede 1758-59 fresco transferred to canvas Palazzo Barberini, Rome |